Mass Determination of New States at Hadron Colliders

Abstract

We propose an improved method for hadron-collider mass determination of new states that decay to a massive, long-lived state like the LSP in the MSSM. We focus on pair produced new states which undergo three-body decay to a pair of visible particles and the new invisible long-lived state. Our approach is to construct a kinematic quantity which enforces all known physical constraints on the system. The distribution of this quantity calculated for the observed events has an endpoint that determines the mass of the new states. However we find it much more efficient to determine the masses by fitting to the entire distribution and not just the end point. We consider the application of the method at the LHC for various models and demonstrate that the method can determine the masses within about 6 GeV using only 250 events. This implies the method is viable even for relatively rare processes at the LHC such as neutralino pair production.